First Extreme E win to Rosberg Racing
The spectacle was indisputable, and the teething problems will help the electric off-road series with the F1 world champion team owners evolve
Extreme E’s maiden voyage into the breathtakingly beautiful Alula desert in Saudi Arabia last weekend emphatically met Oscar Wilde’s criteria for what’s good and bad in life. The championship was talked about as Nico Rosberg’s hand-picked driver line-up of Johan Kristoffersson and Molly Taylor scored an emphatic and historic victory amid the dunes. Social media was a motorsport hubbub during and after the action’s beaming via satellites to be broadcast via UK television network colossuses ITV, BT Sport, Sky Sports and the BBC.
Series co-founder Alejandro Agag cares deeply about the spectacle. Those overlapping rights deals were offered for a minimal fee to get as many eyes as possible on his latest all-electric venture. He stopped by the media centre to watch the dramatic Shoot Out race and sat next to Autosport. Moments before Chip Ganassi Racing charge Kyle Leduc wiped out Abt Cupra racer Claudia Hurtgen, he was imploring the director to cut from one camera angle to the next as the Odyssey 21 E-SUVS were lost amid the plumes of dust.
Visibility included, there were plenty of issues throughout the weekend. Myriad reliability faults for car builder Spark
Racing Technology to go away and resolve; driver complaints over the wide-open nature of the 5.48-mile course that snaked between the walls of the sandstone gorges; discontent for the lack of rear-suspension travel and damping that catapulted axles into the air at will; and wheel-to-wheel racing that only ever lasted as far as Turn 1. But those 20 seconds in the finale when Kristoffersson was dicing with Sebastien Loeb and Timmy Hansen were a sight to behold. It was the spectacle Agag wanted, if perhaps not quite the absolute
“motorsport gold” he reckoned it to be. Those moments will be remembered, which is why Extreme E can count its global litmus test as a big success.
The behaviour of the sand had changed wildly compared to the first recce of the venue in January 2019. Back then it was humid and settled. But in the far drier conditions last week, it billowed up as the cars traversed the desert floor to leave driver visibility at a premium.
That prompted an eleventh-hour change to the race format. Qualifying heats were dropped in favour of one-car time trials on Saturday. For the following day, grids were capped at three cars, rather than four and five entries, in a bid to increase safety.
Initially that garnered flak for a lack of foresight. But those complaints soon fell silent as the weekend gained a proper structure overnight. There was now a natural crescendo. If one car could look incredible passing on its own, then just wait a few hours to witness three of them trading paint. That was the stunning case off the line in the finale.
Those who didn’t progress into the final distributed their share of the ‘Gridplay’ popular vote to decide starting positions for the climax. Chiefly helped by the support of Jenson Button’s JBXE squad and Carlos Sainz Sr’s Acciona Sainz concern, so-called ‘Crazy Race’ victor Andretti United was elected to start on pole from the favoured left-hand side. Hansen reckoned he and team-mate Catie Munnings had earned the backing because “we were underdogs” compared to Lewis Hamilton’s X44 squad and semi-final victor Rosberg X Racing.
The 2019 World Rallycross champion quipped that he had “a lot of beers to buy for the other teams”, and that team co-owner and Mclaren Racing boss
Zak Brown had some discounts to offer on the marque’s range of sportscars.
As the sun doused the Middle East in temperatures above 30C, the Williams Advanced Engineering battery and Spark motors and invertors felt the strain. Combined with more hushed concerns over track speed, the maximum 400kw output of the cars – equivalent to 550bhp – was wound all the way back to 225kw (300bhp). So as Hansen took the race start for the finale alongside Loeb and Kristoffersson and scrabbled off the line, he immediately deployed the four-second ‘hyperdrive’ power boost to get up to speed.
That gave Hansen an initial lead of a half-dozen car lengths and a much-envied clear view ahead. But in a nod to a cheesy line from The Fast and the Furious franchise, it was a case of ‘too soon junior’ for the 28-year-old Swede.
His compatriot Kristoffersson, whose three World Rallycross titles play Hansen’s one, emerged from the middle slot on the starting grid and ran parallel with Loeb for the opening sprint. That forced the nine-time World Rally champion to take his Prodrive-run X44 machine off line and over the ruts in a bid for clean air.
Loeb slowed, and it allowed Kristoffersson to pull across the nose of his decorated rival to the far left of the stage.
Kristoffersson took the wide line to turn in early for the sprint to the first corner and straighten the RXR machine sooner on the other side of the apex. He then thumbed his hyperdrive button to slingshot out of the corner, fly waywardly over the crests and into a lead that he and co-driver
Taylor would never relinquish.
He ended the 4m51s lap with a staggering half-minute advantage over Hansen, while Loeb fell swiftly backwards as he muscled with one of at least three power-steering failures for teams last weekend. A sublime sprint done, Kristoffersson stamped on the anchors to enter the 30km/h (19mph) driver-changeover zone. This time, he took control manually after a software glitch had disengaged the pit limiter during qualifying for an innocent Taylor, and cost them a 60-second penalty.
While Kristoffersson’s form was utterly imperious, it denied viewers a chance to see how effective 2016 Australian Rally champion Taylor had been all weekend.
She backed right off to preserve the car and the impending spoils of glory.
“I was driving at recce speed, taking it really, really easy,” she said. “But that’s the thing about the track, it’s just so rough. So even when you’re taking it easy, it’s still moving around. I was just trying to at least give myself the margin so
I could react and be in control.
“When you have a 30s lead, there’s no point to try and set a lap time because you gain literally nothing. After all Johan’s amazing job to do that, I needed to do my job and not necessarily try to go out and prove how fast you can do a lap. At that point, you’ve got to do the job for the team. That was the focus.”
As a result, Taylor gave 11s back to the chasing Munnings. But it wasn’t close. She crossed the line a good 24s clear to crown herself and Kristoffersson as deserving winners of the first-ever Extreme E round. Team owner Rosberg hailed his drivers, saying: “Johan’s performance was really inspiring and amazing to watch. I’m proud to watch from the outside. Damn stressful on one end, but very proud on the other way to see that amazing action on track.
“I’m just so thankful to Molly for driving so fantastically throughout the weekend. Not a single mistake out there. I’m very thankful, Molly, that you accepted to join our team.”
The 2016 Formula 1 world champion’s jubilance only briefly dipped once when he was asked in good humour during the press conference whether he’d already
fired a text to Hamilton to remind him of the result. The answer was a firm “No”.
Behind Munnings (who will have gained many fans thanks to a starring role in qualifying, when she delivered a competitive lap time in spite of a massive right-rear blowout), Cristina Gutierrez wrestled the recalcitrant X44 car to the finish. At 1m38s adrift of RXR, it was a frustratingly subdued end to a weekend in which the team only made one mistake: when Loeb dropped off line as he climbed a dune to cost himself six seconds in qualifying.
Although Sainz and team-mate Laia Sanz’s event was done as early as 0745 on Sunday, the Spanish combo walked away with a sound fourth place. Only RXR and X44, first and second, could progress from the opening semi-final into the afternoon climax, leaving the big red-and-white Acciona machine to sit in the team’s khaki tent. But Sainz still had an axe to grind, showing Autosport the gouge that had been carved out of his car’s right-rear quarter panel. In that semi-final, he had squeezed Loeb to the inside of the course before the pair collided. He bent down and kindly drew out the moment in the sand. The double World Rally champion wasn’t done there. Unsettled by some elements, chiefly a lack of visibility and the high-speed track design, he held the championship organisers back after class on Saturday night for a few hours.
“My input is ‘I want to be positive’,” he said. “I will try to help the championship. It’s not the time to criticise. Another time. It’s the time to learn and the time to really understand what is the best option.”
But as another accomplished and trophy-winning driver told Autosport while awaiting return PCR tests, the top brass seems more willing to listen than to actually put those lessons into practice.
Jenson Button and co-driver Mikaela Ahlin-kottulinsky acquitted themselves well given their lack of off-road exposure and that the JBXE car was only delivered to the team’s British GT engineers on the Tuesday prior to the event. But much of their fate – they ended in sixth behind the trouble-free Hispano Suiza team of Oliver Bennett and Christine Giampaoli Zonca – lay beyond their control. Ahlin-kottulinsky was hit by the same pit speed-limiter fault as RXR, costing a three-minute penalty in qualifying. Persistent invertor and motor gremlins meant full replacements after Button was forced to run with an 8% power loss on Saturday.
Meanwhile, the pre-event Ganassi promise never materialised after two massive shunts for Leduc, the last of which came as he blasted downhill and lost control of the car to collect Hurtgen, who admitted herself that she was taking things gingerly as she reached the site of her Saturday crash in which she rolled four times. With a third of a lap remaining and plenty of speed in hand, Leduc should have bided his time in what was ultimately a battle for only seventh place. An undeterred Hurtgen rather astonishingly came away from
Saudi with only a bitten tongue to show for her and Abt Cupra’s torrid weekend.
Things were little better for Veloce Racing. Jamie Chadwick flew out for
10 days, including a 72-hour quarantine stint in a hotel room, to complete only one shakedown lap as co-driver Stephane
Sarrazin rolled. After clipping a deceptively stubborn patch of camel grass, the machine flipped. The car’s radio antenna was blasted into the roll cage during the impact and was deemed irreparable in the eyes of championship technical director Renato Moscati (at the time of writing, gently snoring next to Autosport during the airport transfer).
There wasn’t quite a sensation like the last-lap airborne shunt between Nick Heidfeld and Nicolas Prost in the 2014 Beijing E-prix that put the inaugural Formula E race on the map. But as a spectacle, and with the storyline of the reigning F1 champion’s team beaten by two others, Extreme E enjoyed a better start to life.
Asked how he felt in the hours after the first Extreme E round, compared to the Formula E debut six and a half years earlier, Agag said: “It feels almost identical for me. I have the same feeling today after the race as I had in Beijing. The first weekend will have a huge influence on how Extreme E evolves.
“It’s been beyond my wildest expectations. It’s been the best weekend I can think of. I would not have come up with a better script than what happened here the last two days. We have really made our name proud. This is extreme racing.”
He’s not too far wide of the mark at all. Alejandro, when you leave Saudi territory, have a beer legally. You’ve earned it.